


Tiny Grains of Earth

by etherati



Category: Watchmen - All Media Types
Genre: And some porn at the end, Detective Work, Identity Issues, M/M, Mystery, Paranoia, Someone else?, Suspicion, Worry, who knows - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-08
Updated: 2016-08-03
Packaged: 2018-03-29 15:20:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 16,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3901168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/etherati/pseuds/etherati
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rorschach is acting funny, not remembering things how he should, and is just inexplicably different. Dan gets paranoid, and seeks his real partner. Explicit rating for only one chapter, the rest is safely teen+, see notes for details.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Unreliability of Memory

**Author's Note:**

> KM fill. Set in the 60's, early in the partnership. The explicit rating is ONLY applicable to Chapter 8, and you can skip it without missing any major PLOT points, but it is pretty important character-wise, so I wouldn't advise skipping it unless you're really, really averse to the explicit content.

*   
  
It's not a particularly memorable night—just one in a long sequence of them, blurring into each other in the way all of their midnights are lit in neon and sodium, in the way all of their dawns are bathed in neurotic, last-minute violence, as if it is the last chance the wicked will ever have to ply their trade. The coming day casts a sharpness on vision and on memory, burns these moments in.   
  
So: Nite Owl is laughing as his captive struggles against his bonds. It's an oily whip of a boy, restless in the city morning and caught trying to break into a third-floor window. Nite Owl is laughing and Rorschach is hovering nearby, visibly uncomfortable in the growing light.   
  
"Hey, man," Nite Owl says, ignoring the boy's thrashing, methodically binding him to the fence spires between them. "You remember last year, that B and E we stopped on 16th and Hastings?"   
  
Rorschach just grunts, rolls his shoulders in something that could be a shrug. "Much like this one, yes."   
  
Nite Owl laughs again, because of course Rorschach does this, gives him shit for his nostalgia and the humor's deadpan but not unrecognizeable. "Oh, come on. You know damn well it was nothing like—"   
  
And then he sees it—just a little twitch in Rorschach's hands as he fists them into his pockets. Annoyance, or frustration.   
  
Maybe it isn't humor after all.   
  
Dan feels his brow wrinkle under Nite Owl's protective cowl, goggles. "You really don't remember?"   
  
"Doesn't matter."   
  
"It was one of our first patrols. I think I'm a little hurt, here."   
  
"Sentimentality," Rorschach says, and there's a roughness in his voice Dan doesn't remember hearing before, "is a pointless indulgence."   
  
Even the boy has stopped struggling to listen in on this, and that isn't good. If there's an issue here beyond Rorschach being a generic ass—Dan got used to that in the first month—he wouldn't want it made public.   
  
"Okay," Nite Owl finally says, straightening, carefully shelving his concern like a particularly delicate object, high up and safe and secret. "Wasn't that memorable anyway. Lets head back to the ship."   
  
*   
  
Thing is, it was memorable—an illegal collection of chimpanzees and two robbers high on acid tend to do that—and even Rorschach had said that night, 1964's wintery dying breath on both their necks, that it was not a scene he'd ever forget.   
  
It's a little thing, and when Nite Owl reaches for Rorschach's shoulder to help him into Archie and misses by two inches, hand hitting the back of his coat too low, that's a little thing too. But damned if the devil's not in the details, and paying attention to the little things is something Rorschach's spent the last year hammering into him.   
  
"You've gotten taller," he says mildly, like it's not a total absurdity. He doesn't expect a response, doesn't get one; the mask just turns to stare at him, blots coalescing and drifting apart again in a dance that, even after a year, Dan is no closer to deciphering.   
  
*   
  
It's possible, Dan thinks later as he's undressing for bed, that Rorschach's hurt himself somehow, a recent head injury he's kept to himself. On their first week of patrol, the stubborn bastard caught a crowbar in the side from some kid he'd just barely underestimated the speed of, and didn't say a word about it until the cracked ribs started impeding his ability to fight. It's not an unprecedented thing.   
  
Dan rolls onto his side, pulls the blanket up around him. He pictures it: a pipe or plank of wood cracking his partner across the back of his head, sending the fedora flying. He'd stumble, maybe, a split second's vulnerability—then straighten and shake it off and plow back into the fight. Take a moment afterward to pointedly retrieve his hat. Allow the night to go on without comment.   
  
Damn it, it isn't a good scenario—injuries never are, and concussions can be the scariest of the bunch—nor is it the most robust, and Rorschach would dress him down for giving anyone that much benefit of the doubt. But it's a place to start.   
  
And if it doesn't explain the height issue, well, Dan had to have been imagining it, simple as that. His equilibrium was off or maybe he'd been hit in the head sometime in the night too, because people don't just spontaneously change height, do they?   
  
*   
  
He’s not imagining it. It happens again and again, little movements and contacts that mark them as out of sync; Dan’s reflexes and all his body’s instincts keep expecting a partner just a few inches shorter than what he’s currently dealing with. It figures that he wouldn’t notice to look at the man, that it would take his hands to figure it out where his eyes had failed—but eyes have always been useless with Rorschach anyway. He’s a cipher, a shell of clothes and mask that could conceal anything, anyone.   
  
Dan sits in his kitchen, mind picking through and discarding one possibility after another even as he jots each down for analysis. Maybe Rorschach is younger—much younger—than he’d been led to believe, and had only just now hit a growth spurt (too strong, too experienced). Maybe he’s had back problems in the past, resolved enough now to allow him to stand up straight (he's always stood up straight). Maybe…   
  
Right. And maybe he’s suddenly decided to start wearing elevator shoes, too. Dan grimaces at the sheet of notebook paper in front of himself, crumples it up in disgust.   
  
Over the stove, the clock set into an owl’s fat belly happily chimes the hour: Four PM. This late into the autumn that only gives him an hour until nightfall, until Rorschach will be hovering, obtrusive in his unobtrusiveness, in the kitchen doorway. Dan’s not yet sure why the thought makes him so nervous.   
  
“You’re losing it,” he says to himself, to the empty kitchen, hands pressed against his eyes until bright starlights spark against the darkness, take on an edge of pain.   
  
The clock ticks, counting down.   
  
“Seriously losing it,” he repeats, and there is no one there to argue.   
  
* 


	2. Crystallization

He starts being more careful anyway, riding an instinct that he can’t put into context with conscious thought. It twists away every time he tries, leaves him with a headache and a mind damp and raw with frustration, and not much else. 

Still, he does what it tells him to—keeps his goggles and cowl on until patrol is over, until he is alone in the brownstone. Sweeps his basement and kitchen every afternoon for any scrap of identity he may have left lying around, and that should be pointless because Rorschach already pulled that trick six months ago with a utility bill but he hasn’t said the name ‘Daniel,’ strangely warm and permissive among the jagged rocks of his voice, for at least a week. 'Nite Owl', only Nite Owl, the name everyone knows.

Dusk has become an anxious time, an hour of twitchiness and the lukewarm slide of coffee down his throat and the creaking of his kitchen chair, loud against the linoleum, protesting the weight of his armor. And it’s ludicrous, a fully costumed vigilante sipping at cold coffee, hands shaking around the mug, blasted by the bright kitchen lights. He feels like a child in too-big clothes, afraid of being caught.

The clock doesn’t chime. He’s turned that off, because it’s been making him jump out of his skin once an hour on the hour, and he doesn’t need that kind of stress right now. It’s still five, though, and he’s just considering the possibility of retrograde amnesia—Korsakoff's maybe, because he's seen his partner steal enough food to know he's not taking care of himself nutritionally, but that doesn't entirely match with his observations and the height is still a sticking point—when he suddenly catches a whiff of something that Does Not Belong. It’s a chemical smell, alkali, like a harsh detergent, and it’s…

It’s coming from the basement door, where Rorschach stands shuffling his feet on the top step. That’s new too—graceless and unconcerned with manners, he’s always just wandered in before, like he owned the place, like it didn’t _matter_ who owned it, and he certainly has never smelled like this. Try as he might, Dan can’t remember Rorschach ever really smelling like anything except sweat at the end of long nights, anticipation at the beginning of them. Sharp-edged animal smells, not particularly offensive, just raw and honest. Now…

Dan looks up from his mug, locks eyes through the mask. Runs one gauntleted finger along the ceramic rim. Wonders, idly, why he’d bothered to mentally catalogue what his partner _smells like._

“It's time to go,” Rorschach says, nervous, shifting his weight to his other foot. Timid, almost. Like he knows he is somewhere that he doesn’t belong. 

Dan narrows his eyes, lets the silence stretch.

“Right,” he says, Nite Owl now, holding his suspicions carefully close, under his armor and against his chest. They make his breath feel tight, like iron bands belted there, but he will not allow them to seep into his voice. “Work to do. Let’s go.”

*

Archie's been burning oil the last week or so, the smell of it intense in the cockpit. It's been clinging to both of them when they disembark into the streets each night, in their clothes and in their brains, constant. It occurs to Nite Owl as they pace out of the tunnel into the city darkness—first patrol on foot since all this weirdness has started, because something in his brainstem is balking at the idea of being shut up in a confined space with his partner—that it could have masked anything. Soap, bleach, organic solvent. Blood. Because that's there too, just under the other scent, only discernable when he gets close. Not fresh but not terribly old either. Faded.

The shoulder of the coat is stiff with starch, brittle with overwashing (two inches too high) under his hand. He has to be careful not to appear too observant, careful not to look for too long, but there's a thin, spitting rain coming down, cold and misting where it hits the day's sun-warmed asphalt, and the city lights play through it with a strangeness that breaks apart the familiar. 

Are the blots shifting like they always have, stretched over the same planes of the same face, heat and pressure in all the right places? The questions rise, unbidden. Is that wide, shoulder-width feet-planted stance natural, a body's long habit, or is it an imitation, a form? Do the coat, the hat, the pants all fit him precisely right, in that meticulous way that'd always made Nite Owl assume the costume to be tailored from scratch?

Has he always favored his left leg just slightly, body accommodating the motion with long practice, some ancient injury Nite Owl hadn't been present for?

"You're staring, Nite Owl," Rorschach growls, and that, at least, sounds like him. Nite Owl lets out a held breath.

"Sorry," he says, and on some level, he is. Maybe he's overthinking this, letting his imagination run wild like he'd done so often as a kid, psyching himself into believing that yes, there really was a monster under his bed, in his closet, behind his walls. Under his best friend's face. "Little out of it tonight."

"I've noticed. You have been for the last several nights."

Dan laughs, a little short, a touch hysterical. "Yeah. Yeah, I haven't been getting much sleep."

"Anything I can assist with?" the mask asks, and that doesn't seem right, too quick, too helpful, but Nite Owl had almost gotten himself knocked off a building last night, a terrifyingly close call, and he can almost buy that Rorschach's concerned enough to have had the offer pre-loaded. Almost.

He shakes his head. "Not really, man. Just some things I need to work out."

"Hrn." Rorschach nods after a long moment, though he doesn't seem convinced. Turns to swing himself up onto a fire escape ladder, all easy grace. "I'd suggest you work them out sooner rather than later."

"Yeah, I know," Dan says, and now the laughter's a little more honest, because that's such a _Rorschach_ thing to say, and maybe… he shakes his head, reaching for the ladder to follow. "It's getting a little hazardo—"

He cuts off. Above him, the mist has turned the light just so, and he can see what he's been missing for a week: the faded, washed-out outline of a bloodstain in the dark canvas, spread out along Rorschach's side, asymmetrical and centered over a carefully stitched gash just over his ribs. Laundered to within an inch of its life in a clear attempt to hide it.

And all of Dan's fears crystallize at once, a supercooled freeze. He locks in place on the ladder, has a sudden, horrifying flash of Rorschach fighting without backup on some lonely night, being overwhelmed, catching a knife between the ribs and going down—being hovered over and watched as he died, jackals waiting to descend and steal everything that had been his, that had made his life meaningful. And Rorschach _had_ patrolled alone for a few nights last week, hadn't he?

"Nite Owl?" The voice floats down from above, and this is a distant and isolated enough place that he should have said _Daniel_ , should have—

This is what his gut had been telling him, what his instincts had been protecting him from, forcing him to hold his identity closer than he'd ever kept it. This is why five o'clock had become a haunting time, jittery with caffeine and fear. Now, instead of fear, all he can feel is a blast of terrible, shattering grief.

"Are you coming?" the voice asks, impatient, and it's so familiar that it cuts. Dan closes his eyes behind the goggles, rides out the anguish, lets it pass over and through him and out. If this is true—and he doesn't know for certain that it is, but even the possibility is almost more than he can bear—then he cannot give the game away, get himself killed too.

It's not what Rorschach would have wanted. He has to believe that.

Swallowing back on the impulse to scream, all frustration and impotent fury, Nite Owl forces his hands to unclench, to move on the rungs. "Yes," he says, "Sorry," and his voice doesn't even shake.

*


	3. Running Odds

*   
  
He decides, in the early hours of morning, to take the next few nights off. The faked cough isn't as practiced as it might have been in his school days, but he still starts it building, gradually, over the last hour of patrol. For verisimilitude.   
  
"Ill, Nite Owl?" the man beside him asks, with what sounds to Dan's ears right now like a precisely calculated level of concern.   
  
Dan lets out another good hack and puts his hands on his knees, breathes theatrically. "Yeah, I think I'm coming down with something. Sort of dizzy off and on all night, you know?"   
  
"Will be available for patrol tomorrow?"   
  
"I'll have to wait and see, man."   
  
He tells himself it's practical, that if there really is a stranger under Rorschach's mask then at best he won't have his back covered and at worst, it will be targeted. He tells himself it's the tactically sound course, as he coughs and coughs.   
  
Rorschach makes a sound in his throat like amusement and annoyance incongruously tangled, settles one gloved hand on Dan's back. He moves it in strange circles, like he means to calm the fit, has seen this done to other people but doesn't really know how to do it himself.   
  
A long minute passes. The awkwardness hangs, comfortable.   
  
The truth is, Dan realizes only when that tentative weight lifts away again, that he needs some distance between himself and the idea that Rorschach may really be dead and dumped in a gutter somewhere, his wistful dreams for exactly this sort of moment dashed forever. Ideas can bleed raw and ugly as well as wounds do, and he needs the grounding.   
  
"Too soft, Nite Owl," Rorschach says, hand shifting back to his pocket, and if it is an imitation, it is perfect.   
  
It is in this moment that Dan resolves to get to the bottom of all of this, for better or for worse.   
  
*   
  
His morning paper is useless. The police blotter only goes back a few days, and it has been at least a week since he started noticing these things. The vigilante Rorschach being found dead would have provided gruesome fodder for at least a month's news cycle, but an unidentifiable, forgotten man, left in an alleyway? This is New York, and Dan doesn't kid himself about what that means.   
  
So he shuffles between its fluttering sheets and the coffee machine, skimming through it again a few pages at a time, restless. He stops when he gets to the classifieds; Rorschach's taught him to be thorough, but it's not as if anyone's going to run an ad for a found body.  _Have you lost this person?_    
  
Dan snorts, hitches the blanket higher around his shoulders. Dark humor's always been suited to their lives. He's just on the edge of not being able to manage it.   
  
In the living room, the sun is already high, slivering through his windows to slice the floor into broad swaths. Step here; don't step there. The blanket trails at his ankles—he doesn't need it, but instinct is telling him to keep up the act anyway, no matter that he thinks he's alone.  
  
His brain is telling him,  _Paranoia_.   
  
He's distracted, running odds, estimated chances of Rorschach actually displaying each of the changes he's noticed without being a different person. Pulled muscle, maybe fifty percent; he's always hurting himself. Artificial height adjustment, christ, maybe one percent. And so on. If he multiplies them together, he should get a sense of how likely it is that his friend is still under there, still alive and well...   
  
...but halfway through the odds get unwieldy and, honestly, depressing. Dan stops keeping track.   
  
He sits for a long moment, nursing his coffee, lips burning on the rim.   
  
He's not even sure who he's intending to call when his hand scoops up the endtable phone, but his fingers dial of their own volition and after a stretch of ringing and ringing, hollow on the line, Hollis picks up.   
  
*   
  
"Hey, Danny," says the telephone, and Dan takes a breath, so relieved to hear a voice that is real enough and free enough of affectations to be inimitable that he can hardly contain it. "What can I do you for? You're not canceling Saturday, are you?"   
  
In the background, the sound of puttering, a pot clanking into a sink. "No," Dan says, a little breathless. "No, I'm not canceling. I never cancel."   
  
"Sorry, son. I just know that partner of yours drives you awfully hard."   
  
"Hey," Dan says, forcing a laugh. "I can stand up to him."   
  
"That you can."   
  
Dan taps a finger on the arm of the sofa, then a different one, alternating. He feels a powerful urge to be up and moving, but the cord won't stretch and he knows it. "So, about him, actually," he says, diving right in. "I'm kind of in trouble, Hollis."   
  
"Trouble?" Just like that, the light tone has evaporated, and Dan is reminded of why the streets once feared the first Nite Owl as much as they now do the second.   
  
It's a little intimidating, if he's honest. "I... god damn it, Hollis, this is going to sound ridiculous."   
  
"Go on and sound ridiculous, then."   
  
A breath. Gather the words. "He's been acting... not like himself, not remembering things right, and there's a lot of circumstantial evidence like... like he's taller all of a sudden, for god's sake, and there's blood on his coat, not fresh I mean, it's a stain, but..."   
  
"Take more breaths," Hollis says, because he is rambling, and he knows he's rambling but he can't  _stop_.   
  
"I think it might not be him, anymore," he rushes out, before he can bury his fear under more disjointed words, deep enough that neither of them will be able to dig it out. "I think maybe they got him, and put someone in his place."   
  
"You think?" Incredulous. "You don't know?"   
  
"I'm... kind of having trouble determining that. It's not like it's easy to ID someone you've never seen, I mean..."   
  
Silence, long and damning.   
  
"Dan," Hollis says after a careful moment. "How could you let this happen?"   
  
Dan sinks into the couch cushion, despair squeezing his heart. "I don't  _know_ , he was patrolling alone, I should have been out there with him, I don't know what—"   
  
"No, no," the voice interrupts. "I don't mean that, I mean— look, Danny. When I was Nite Owl, there wasn't a single member of our team that I didn't know well enough that... well,  _this_  would never have happened, anyway."   
  
Dan fidgets, picks at the seam of the couch with one finger. Closes his eyes, waiting for what he knows is coming.   
  
"How could you possibly put your trust in someone that you know so little about?"   
  
Fingers rub at his eyes, pressing until he sees sparks. He thinks of the feel of hands around his wrist, pulling him out of a twelve-story fall; thinks of the way the same hands have led children out of hellholes and rats' dens, impossibly gentle on fragile shoulders and elbows, so careful.   
  
"I know things," Dan says. "They're just not things that'll pick the guy out of a lineup, you know?"   
  
Another long silence, and Dan counts to ten in his head because he knows damn well Hollis is probably misinterpreting that as they (fail to) speak, and he is determined not to care. It doesn't matter.   
  
It doesn't.   
  
"Well," Hollis says, seeming to have traded the critical tone for something more mild. "I'm sure you didn't call me for a lecture."   
  
"No."   
  
"So what can I do to help?"   
  
Dan exhales, a long sigh. "If he really is... out of commission, I guess it'd help to check the police for people they've, uh."   
  
A crackly silence, broken up by the sound of a dog barking. Phantom's a good dog, but over the line, he sounds like a beast, a monster. Something of nightmares.   
  
"You're asking me to pull the unsolved homicides," Hollis says, careful.   
  
He tries to reply; finds his throat to not be working correctly. It keeps trying to close up on him.   
  
"All right, well, I'll call a few of the guys I still know in there and let you know. But Danny?"   
  
Dan tries again, succeeds this time. "Yeah?"   
  
"...I hope you're wrong, son. I really do."   
  
* 


	4. The Anatomy of Belief

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay! I was in the Dominican Republic doing medical relief work for a few weeks, and then recovering from the bug I picked up there for another week or so. But I'm back now!

*   
  
Dreams. Almost fever dreams except he doesn't really have a fever, but something deep and buried in cloying cheesecloth layers of instinct is still keeping him from surfacing.   
  
Something disjointed about snaking tendrils of light and the feel of pressure on his forehead, on his face; a puff of stale air against closed eyelids, and the distant sound of cats screaming like twisted violins.   
  
A mundane dream: he is in the kitchen when Hollis calls him back, and they've found the body, they're sure of it, and Hollis is so, so sorry. It should make no sense that they're so  _certain_ , that they had a description to match it to when Dan doesn't have one himself, but that doesn't matter in the dream. He's in the kitchen listening to Hollis and it's not his kitchen, it's his parents' kitchen from back home, and he just wants to die but Hollis is asking  _do you have a knife, son?_  and he's saying  _we think he's somewhere in the house with you_ —   
  
He's in a laundromat, has clothes to wash but all the machines are stuffed with more screaming cats, and when he pulls one out by its tail its skin feels like canvas, like it is stitched from the remnants of a coat. It still scratches him, a deep gash down one arm that suddenly won't stop bleeding, and if he can get to his basket he can staunch the flow but everything slows   
  
down   
  
and   
  
  
he   
　   
  
  
  
can't—   
  
*   
  
Somewhere near dawn, he opens his eyes. The bed feels real, the minute grain of the cloth against bare skin and the ticking of the bedside clock and the way air drifts through the strange geography of the old townhouse, but he must still be dreaming—across from him, in the doorway, the sillouette of a hat and coat, perfectly and inhumanly still, watching him.   
  
He means only to blink, but his eyes feel heavy on the way down. By the time they rise again, the apparition is gone.   
  
Dream, he thinks, sure of it, and rolls over to have another.   
  
*   
  
When he finally pulls himself out of bed at around nine in the morning, it's with all the back-pulling and mind-pulling that usually follows a night of profoundly disturbing nightmares. The body never gets much rest on nights like that, and the mind feels like it's had no downtime at all.   
  
Dan can't remember much, faced with the morning. Something about a laundromat? And a telephone, and a knife? Had he had the knife  _in_ the laundromat? Eh, these things never make much sense, but there is always a frustration in not being able to piece them together.   
  
Whatever. Kitchen, coffee. He hikes a blanket up around his shoulders, this time simply because the October chill has finally made its way in through all his doorseals and double-paned windows. Such cold mornings, lately.   
  
His bedroom door is closed, which is fine. Padding down the stairs, something smells a little off in the air, like chemicals or bleach. Gas leak? No, it's a different kind of acrid entirely, thank god.   
  
In the kitchen, the lights flicker on, obedient.   
  
On the table, a fresh bottle of cough syrup, seal intact, of a cheap generic brand that he never buys.   
  
Dan stands in the doorway, staring, for a very long time.   
  
There's no note, when he finally gets the courage to walk over and look. Nothing to compare handwriting to, because he already knows how this got here and that last snippet of maybe-not-dream has come back to him all at once, hit him in the ribs and stomach, made it hard to breathe.   
  
It takes no pretense of illness this time to shiver, deep and terrified, and slump into the nearest chair, head cradled in his hands, the whole world about an inch from cracking.   
  
*   
  
How much research, Dan thinks later, sitting at the table with the syrup bottle tilting between his fingers; how much research would it take to get the exact tone of an awkward gift and attempt at comfort precisely right? How much research could a random opportunistic thug have done?   
  
It falls into the category of things he  _does_  know, really. That Rorscahch would pretend to be unconcerned but creep into his house to check on him anyway; that he would buy no-frills medicine because  _excess just goes to line profiteering phamacutical executives' pockets, Daniel_. It's a level of knowledge that Dan optimistically classifies as his own only, not subject to imitation.   
  
 _And hey, he was in your house while you were sleeping and you're not dead._    
  
Where Rorschach is concerned, that's always a good sign.   
  
"All right," he says aloud, pushing to his feet. He crosses to the sink, measures out a dose of the stuff, and dumps it down the drain. A hunch isn't enough to overcome the possibility that the syrup might have been tampered with, but if it  _is_  still Rorschach under there—a more likely proposition now than it'd seemed an hour ago—then he doesn't want to appear ungrateful.   
  
The faucet runs, loud and scouring.   
  
"All right," he says again, switching the water off, leaning heavily on the sink. "It's just a mystery, it's just a case. I can do this."   
  
*   
  
The days pass quickly, broken up by restless nights and moments of waking hysteria when he is sure Rorschach's furious spirit has come to murder him in his sleep. Hypnagogia, and even if not, his house creaks as it settles and as the autumn winds buffet it, providing plenty of real noises to startle and shake him. There's not much to be done for it.   
  
During the day, he consults outdated medical texts about memory loss, sudden growth spurts, how much blood a body can lose before it's likely to die. The stain on Rorschach's coat had seemed huge and terrible in the moonlight, but he's finding that a full pint would make a bigger mess, and even that wouldn't have killed him on its own.   
  
For Rorschach's part, there may be more visits but there are no signs of them, and Dan dutifully dumps a capful of syrup down the drain every night.   
  
Somewhere in there is Saturday, and he visits with Hollis as always, and they spend three hours carefully dancing around the bigger issues, slipping past them with the aid of beer and sentimentality. It's nice; a rare break, a chance to relax and, for one night, not be terrified of what news morning will bring.   
  
Then Hollis slips him a wide manila folder, strapped around with rubber bands, on his way out the door. The alcohol burns off his brain in an instant.   
  
"You didn't get it from me," is all Hollis says, switching out the porchlight, whistling and whistling for Phantom.   
  
*   
  
Dan is a jittery mess by the time he's halfway home.   
  
In the entryway, he stands for a long minute, listening to the house. The lock shows no signs of having been picked or jimmied, but the knob is warmer in his hand than seems right, and in the random pattern of dark tiles on light, he could swear he sees something like symmetry.   
  
The packet wouldn't be so thick if it were one definitive case, he reminds himself.   
  
He treads forward into the entryway, then the kitchen beyond it. Nothing is out of order, nothing to indicate that there's anyone else in the house. He holds his breath, listens again; the walls are silent. Nothing else breathing in here.   
  
Of course not, god. He's turning paranoid, is what's going on. He snaps the rubber bands off, spreads the folder out on the table, starts paging through the cases. Hollis hasn't provided crime scene photographs—much harder to get than printouts, probably, and in violation of privacy laws—and Dan is irrationally glad of that. It's one thing to read through a description and think, abstractly,  _that might be my friend they're talking about_ ; facing the visceral reality is more than he thinks he could handle.   
  
Hollis has also helpfully sorted out and provided only the male victims, but even with that filter point, there's very little here that matches. Too tall, too heavy, too old or too young. Long hair that Rorschach could never have concealed, or—   
  
Wait. Five foot seven, hundred thirty five pounds, twenty seven years old. Cause of death: stab wound between the ninth and tenth ribs. Shit.   
  
Dan slumps into the chair, squaring the report in front of him. Leon Piztrang, the paper lists, identified from a drivers' license in his wallet. Found a week ago in the garment district, which is within their usual area of patrol, and Dan distantly notices his fingers going white around the sheaf. Missing for two days before. But no—he's listed as a journalist by occupation, and Rorschach has mentioned being in menial labor, factory work. And why would he have had his civilian ID on him, on patrol?   
  
One breath, two. He wouldn't have, of course. Because this isn't him.   
  
Dan resolutely shuffles it into the stack of definite rejects. He might be being excessively wishful by not having a 'maybe' pile; with each that shows any discrepancy, the reject pile grows, and he feels a little better. Maybe he's kidding himself, but more than anything he wants to hit the other side of the envelope with every scrap discarded.   
  
He doesn't quite manage it. Near the end, one case, an unidentified body of the right dimensions and age, likely homeless, no money or paperwork. Blunt trauma, the coroner claims, but there's no saying he wasn't stabbed first.   
  
Dan frowns, folds the packet in half, sets it aside.   
  
The clock reads midnight, give or take. He shuffles the rejects back into the envelope, bands them back up, sets the folded papers on top of it. He walks to the sink, picks up the bottle of cough syrup, uncaps it and holds it up to the lamp. Only about one dose left, but it still catches the light, glows a thick, cloudy red.   
  
"I believe in you," he mutters, knocking back what's left in the bottle in one long pull.   
  
* 


	5. Scrutiny

*   
  
Sunday passes by with no poisoning deaths in the Dreiberg household—some wooziness, a little disorientation, but that's all right there on the label—and by Monday Dan's about ready to concede that no one, apparently, is trying to kill him.   
  
He's very careful with the knowledge. Drama of the moment aside, it does not mean that he's dealing with the real Rorschach, just that he's likely in no danger from whoever  _is_  under the mask and hat. What cause a person could have to imitate another without dire motives is the real mystery, and Dan wrestles with it all morning, turning the idea over and over like a rock in his hands, feeling for its shape, for the mossy underbelly and the worms and rot it must conceal.   
  
Around midday, a break comes through when Hollis stops by unexpectedly, hands him a pair of old newspaper clippings from the forties. Thought they might come in handy, he says, with that piercing look about him that means  _there is more than what I am saying, here_.   
  
Dan looks through them, after Hollis continues on his way, errands to run. The first reports on an impostor mask running around the city, a deranged fan dressed vaguely like the first Nite Owl himself. The Minutemen, when reached for comment, claimed to have never come into contact with him—but he was still out there, the paper warned, making messes that the police and real vigilantes had to clean up. Scrawled in the margin in Hollis's cramped but elegant hand:  _Eventually disappeared. Maybe killed?_    
  
The second details a more chilling case, and it sits closer, right up inside the ribs.   
  
 _Thomas Shriver was arrested yesterday,_  it reads,  _at the headquarters of the Minutemen, the city's ad-hoc vigilante organization, when he arrived to a gathering of the masked heroes dressed in the costume of the mask known as 'Mothman'. After attempting to pass himself off as authentic, the others immediately detained him and called for an official escort to the county jail.  
  
The man has identified himself in interviews as a 'big fan' of the mask Dollar Bill. The apparent motive, beyond mental instability, was to approach and work with his hero with no one the wiser.   
  
The real Mothman's location is still unknown at time of printing._   
  
In the margin, again:  _Found Byron tied up in a warehouse two days later, thank god._    
  
Dan sets down the clippings, takes a breath, puffs it out sharply enough to rustle the paper. No wonder Hollis had said this would never have happened in his time; it had been tried, and both times they'd caught it before it escalated into disaster. But this still provides him with new information, or at least a new idea as to what might be going on here beyond just 'crazed criminal wants to kill him'.   
  
Some people just need to be something bigger than themselves. Some, he supposes, are just lonely. Either way, it's time to put a stop to this.   
  
*   
  
"If you've killed him," he mutters into the stillness of the basement as he strips down, starts layering on Nite Owl's skin. He's not rehearsing, exactly; more like reminding himself. "I don't care how lonely you are, or how crazy you are. Or how good you are at pretending."   
  
No sign of Rorschach yet, but he's seen the muddy footprints in the tunnel entrance, knows he comes at least that far every night to see if Dan is returning to duty. "If you've killed him, I'll..."   
  
He'll what? Kill the bastard back? He wants to say it, wants to believe he's capable of being that force of vengeance for Rorschach, but the words don't come easily. The thought of killing someone, in hot or cold blood, is just...   
  
"I'll make sure," he finally says, "that you get everything that's coming to you."   
  
"Talking to yourself, Nite Owl?"   
  
Dan whips around, feet and hands slipping immediately into a defensive posture, cape a rippling ribbon of brown and gold. In the tunnel entrance, Rorschach or something very much like him, hunching the collar up on his coat.   
  
Seconds pass, tense.   
  
Then there's a low sound coming from Rorschach, rolling impossibly like laughter. It sounds nothing like human or humorous, and it's only through long acquaintance that Dan is able to identify it at all.   
  
He lowers his arms, snorts a laugh of his own. "Scared the shit out of me, man."   
  
"Wouldn't have thought I was that frightening, under the circumstances."   
  
"Whatever, I'm still convalescing, here."   
  
Rorschach paces in from the entryway, eats up the basement floor more quickly than his stride should allow. "Still suiting up, though. Good to know you're that dedicated."   
  
"I've always been dedicated," Dan says, sitting down to pull on his boots. "Remember back when—"   
  
He cuts himself off. Looks up at Rorschach, who has his head tilted curiously to one side. He doesn't remember, won't remember, or maybe he's just waiting to see which tired old story Nite Owl will trot out. The uncertainty feels freeing, even if a braver man would forge ahead.   
  
"Nevermind," Dan says, because he's being brave enough hitting the streets with this enigma again, doesn't have any to spare. "You ready to go?"   
  
"Always."   
  
*   
  
There's so much of the city that Dan is familiar with, feet reacting before his mind has caught up, muscle-and-nerve knowledge that has nothing to do with analysis or thought. It stands in sharp contrast to the things he doesn't know, tonight, and he revels in the moments when that knowledge is enough.   
  
When it isn't, he has time to think. Rorschach's uncharacteristic silence isn't helping matters.   
  
Two nights ago, he'd been certain that he knew who was under the mask, sure enough to risk killing himself. Yesterday, he hadn't been so sure. Earlier tonight the uncertainty felt good, but now it's souring into something violent, acidic, eating up what's left of his resolve.   
  
Rorschach says something, quiet, and Dan has to shake himself, ask him to repeat it.   
  
"Cats," he says, pointing a gloved hand—the left one—toward a pile of refuse. Through the night vision, Dan can see at least six sleeping bodies. Wait, no. Not sleeping, and Dan presses his lips into a thin line. Rorschach rolls his shoulders, visibly uncomfortable. "Someone's been poisoning them."   
  
"That's horrible."   
  
Rorschach drops to one knee, smoothly, whatever complaint had upset his gait before now apparently resolved. He runs a finger through the edges of a nearby pool of water, rain runoff gathered in a pothole, and they come away faintly shimmering, as if he'd run them through sugar crystals, or salt. "Also a crime."   
  
"That's strychnine, isn't it?"   
  
"Yes. Knew a cat once, very briefly, I—" Rorschach mutters, then cuts himself off. Stands for a moment, then strips the glove off inside-out, presses it into his pocket, clearly willing to go barehanded rather than risk spreading the poison around. After a moment: "Very painful way to die. We should call this in."   
  
Dan doesn't move. He's thinking of the things he knows and the things he doesn't know, and how they all fit.   
  
He's thinking of the screaming of cats, a memory or a dream, or both.   
  
"Something wrong, Nite Owl?" Rorschach asks, all gruffness returned, no sign of that brief moment's vulnerability. "Defenseless victims don't count when they aren't human?"   
  
"Of course they do," Dan snaps, because just who was it that spent four months nursing a broken-winged pigeon back to health after their first week of patrol? Has he forgotten  _that_ , too? "I'll go find a payphone."   
  
There's one by the mouth of the alley, conveniently enough, and as Dan drops in a nickel, dials the local dispatch, he keeps one eye on Rorschach's silhouette in the alley. The phone rings and rings, and Rorschach crouches in front of the refuse pile, not touching but caught up in some sort of silent vigil. Dan feels something in his heart crack at the sight, and for the first time, he finds himself wondering not what he will do if that isn't Rorschach, but what he will do if it  _is_.   
  
Then the dispatch picks up, interrupting the thought, and he recites off the details, mechanically agrees with the woman's frustrated  _what is wrong with people these days_ , and returns to his partner's side.   
  
*   
  
 "Working on a case," Rorschach says about an hour later, and though it isn't a question, Dan knows it's directed at him.   
  
It's been a tense hour, broken up momentarily by an armed robbery here, some kids tripped out on acid there; a handful of punks armed with spray paint and a distrust for authority that had bordered on the pathological. Rorschach's been silent for the most part, and Dan had chalked it up to his still being upset about the cats—and if he's honest, Dan isn't quite sure what to make of that. Sure, it'd been cruel and horrible, and definitely against the law, but he'd never seen his partner behave quite like that before, gruff and hardened heart out there on his sleeve.   
  
 _If it's really him_ , Dan thinks,  _you're going to have a hard time not—_    
  
No, better not to examine that right now. Anyway, he's being asked a non-question.   
  
"A case?" Play stupid, because the real Rorschach would see right through it; good opportunity to test him. "I don't know what you—"   
  
"Saw the files, Nite Owl. Unsolved homicides, all a week old, all violent assaults."   
  
He saw the— he was in the kitchen, without Dan knowing, and it's one thing to be aware of the random home invasions but to have them going on under his nose without picking up on the signs—   
  
Outwardly, Dan tries not to look shaken. Keep everything close, or he risks losing control of this.   
  
Rorschach continues, unfazed; he's either oblivious or playing the same game. "Don't know why you're keeping..." he starts, then trails off, almost self-conscious.   
  
"What?"   
  
They pass by a storefront, lit in bright neon, and the silhouette next to him shudders. Rolls his shoulders to disguise it. "... _secrets_ ," he says, and the word comes out sibilant and strange, like the hiss of water over hot metal. He sounds disgusted with himself.   
  
He's also either blushing or flushed with rage under the mask, ink pooling in a very familiar pattern. It's one Dan's seen when the hookers and hustlers get too close, or when a line gets crossed and fury overwhelms sense. He finds himself wondering, analytical: do different people flush differently, capillaries under the skin like a fingerprint, leading the ink into unique whorls and eddies? Or is it basically the same for everyone? It's not like the mask is exactly high resolution, after all.   
  
"Am I?" Dan threads out into the air, nonchalant, goggles following the sparse population of the street as it ducks and weaves through itself. "Keeping secrets?"   
  
"Can always be of assistance, if it's a case you think is worth investigating." Rorschach's words are drawn out, slow. Almost languid, in a stilted way that is trying to be anything but. "I trust your judgment, Nite Owl."   
  
 _Private cases are a waste of time_ , Dan's memory growls, as they turn from the street and back into darkness.  _Distraction from your real duty._    
  
"Yeah well." A rust-mottled fire escape creaks above them, conjuring the thought of eavesdroppers. It's probably just another cat on the prowl, taking a few minutes out in an opportunistic stakeout. "I think I'm handling this one okay on my own, you know?"   
  
Rorschach stops, makes a show of looking around the vicinity, as if something's put him on alert. Dan can't tell if it's part of an overall ruse or just Rorschach's inherent inability to act. "...saw the record you'd set aside. Homeless cases are never solved, Nite Owl."   
  
"Always a first time."   
  
"Ignored, by the general populace. Forgettable to the police, without a tearful family on camera to feed the news cycle," and Dan winces; considers for a moment how relieved he'd be if the man in that report turned out not to be his friend and how screwed up that is, because a man is still dead, with no one to mourn him.   
  
"Unwanted," Rorschach concludes, disgusted.   
  
Dan nods, feels a tightness in his throat, wonders what kind of civilization this is that they meet all of their unwanted things with violence. Cats in the gutter, children in dumpsters, lovers grown too weary of and driven away with black-eye kisses and too much regret.   
  
They live in a terrible place. It shouldn't feel like a revelation.   
  
"Of course," Rorschach continues, almost airy, dismissive. "We are also fairly unwanted, by a large portion of the people we encounter."   
  
It's almost an invitation, it's so blatant. Eyes drop to the side of Rorschach's coat, still stained and stitched up and ominous, and Dan wants badly to ask, to fake a laugh and say  _Hey, speaking of that,_  and just  _find out_. At least put the man next to him under the metaphorical interrogation lamp, see what cracks he can find.   
  
If he were fed a believable enough explanation, he doesn't think he'd have it in himself to question it.   
  
Dan just takes a shaky breath through his nose, nods in agreement. Doesn't take the bait. Seconds pass, sluggish, broken only by the metal noises overhead.   
  
"Meant what I said, Nite Owl," Rorschach finally says, and that strange tone is back, lining his words with an undercurrent that is nothing short of electric. "I can come back to the nest tonight, to... help, with the case. If you'd like."   
  
Jesus, electric and  _forward_ , and if Dan didn't know his partner, he'd say he was being flirted with, maybe even so far as propositioned; 'help' indeed. But he  _doesn't_  know his partner—that's the problem.   
  
He flashes back to the clippings Hollis brought by, the Mothman imitator, the newspaper's carefully euphemistic rewording of his reasons and drives; remembers the disjointedly insistent way Lewis had demanded, in the institution in Maine, to see his old partner. And there had always been rumors.   
  
There are rumors about  _them_ , too. If someone wanted—   
  
The fire escape creaks again, and its occupant finally dislodges itself, patience abruptly run out, landing on silent feet to pad off into the alley. Dan watches until it disappears, the creature's tail bent like a question mark.   
  
If this isn't Rorschach, he has an idea of what the pretender wants, now.   
  
If it  _is_  Rorschach... god, that leaves him with a lot of thinking to do, very quickly.   
  
"...I'd rather work this one on my own for now," he repeats, and Rorschach inhales too sharply through his mask, fists his hands in his pockets. He's simmering with frustration or anger or annoyance, Dan can't be sure which. His color is high again, if the mask is any indication, but that could mean anything.   
  
The moment passes, eventually, and they walk on.   
  
*   
  
Suspicion comes in waves and troughs, inexorable when it's there but so gone when it's gone that Dan can't even remember the shape of it in his hands.   
  
At 3 AM, low tide, Dan's sure it hadn't been a real proposition. His partner's flustered and embarrassed behavior was more consistant with an awkward teenager's rebuffed attempt to be social than with a frustrated conquest. He's been acting strangely too, Dan has to remind himself, and Rorschach would have every right to be baffled by it; he remembers all the times he's had a friend suddenly go cold and strange, how squarely he'd blamed himself, how desperately he'd flailed in every direction to try to fix it. He feels bad, for the moment, that he's putting his friend through that.   
  
At 3:19, the wave crests and he catches himself watching the man's every move, making sure his hands stay where Dan can see them, analyzing his posture and gait for ulterior motives. He reminds himself of the duty he has to his possibly-fallen friend; He plays the offer over and over in his mind, and with every repeat, it becomes more salacious, more brazen.  _Help you_. That anyone could do this, could hurt or kill a man's friend and expect to use it to get close to him, is sickening and infuriating and Dan badly needs someone to hit.   
  
But a convenient punk utterly fails to present himself, and he can't hit  _Rorschach_ , because what if it really  _is_  him? How must he be interpreting all of this cold silence?   
  
So it goes, back and forth and back again; by quarter to four, he's about ready to consider that he's actually going insane. Then Rorschach leans in, a little closer than usual but nothing damning, lowers his voice, and says: "Trust the medicine was acceptable?"   
  
He leans away again, and Dan gets it—it was an acknowledgement of his infirmity, and Rorschach didn't want anyone to overhear. Dan is once again convinced that he's been imagining things the whole time, because that's so  _Rorschach_  he could scream—with frustration, with fury, with relief. With something murkier than all of them that he doesn't have a name for yet, that swims just under all the tension but refuses to reveal itself.   
  
"It was fine," he says, trying to stabilize his tone, inject it with some real warmth and strip out the strangeness. Really, Rorschach didn't have to get him—   
  
 _touch on his forehead, his face, stale breath on his eyelids, invasive in the pre-dawn quiet_    
  
It wasn't a dream. Shit.   
  
Dan narrows his eyes behind the goggles. Finds himself saying, before he quite knows why, "Got me high as a kite, though."   
  
Rorschach freezes—then hunches his shoulders again, like he's trying to sink down inside himself. "Didn't... that wasn't my intention." He sounds scandalized, and a little ashamed. "Thought that it would be... innocuous. And helpful. Apologies."   
  
"It wasn't a big deal," Dan says, and he knows now that this is another test. "Just ended up rolling around on the kitchen floor naked for a while—"   
  
A choked, inarticulate noise. " _Nite Owl!_ "   
  
"...it was actually pretty funny, in retrospect. What?" Dan grins, playing innocent, leaning in to nudge Rorscahch with his elbow. "There's no one to hear, and what's a story like that between  _friends_ , right?"   
  
Rorschach goes quiet then, and maybe he's been pushed too far, whoever he is. Dan chews his lip, wishes for pockets in his uniform, suddenly longs for the time when he could have just thrown his arm over Rorschach's shoulders, and laughed, and said  _Come on, it's just a joke,_  and said  _Come back for coffee, I'll make it up to you..._  in that teasing way that Rorschach would have known precisely how to ignore.   
  
Instead, they walk. The hours pass in precarious silence, shaken by the noise of the ladders they climb and of fingers on ledges, the scuffling violence of scum eating itself up in the dark. But never broken, not really, and the sun's coming up over the line of skyscrapers and billboards and streetsigns by the time they find themselves approaching the warehouse. It lights the world in sharp pale yellows, outlines them unnaturally against the receding night, and Dan fantasizes for a moment that maybe no lies can stand up for themselves in this in-between place.   
  
Then Rorschach speaks, quiet and uncharacteristically open. It barely ecapes the mask, winds out from under the brim of his hat. "Whatever I've done wrong," he says, "would appreciate it if you would just tell me. Instead of... playing games."   
  
And then he's gone, pacing away on feet too silent to track, evaporating into the dawn as if he'd never been here. The anger—or maybe frustration, or the first bitter trace of grief—lingers in his shape, though, stands accusing.   
  
"...god," Dan says after some time has passed, once the sun has crested the skyline and he is well and truly alone. "I am such an asshole."   
  
* 


	6. Leaps of All Kinds

*  
  
He can't go on like this. Maybe a man made of sterner stuff, one inured to the annoyances of guilt and emotion—Rorschach himself, for instance, although he isn't even sure of that, now—could maintain this kind of investigation indefinitely. A week along and Dan's already exhausted.  
  
Exhausted, and still feeling like an ass come nightfall again. They don't talk about it; Dan's just glad Rorschach's back, hasn't taken the opportunity to pull a two week disappearing act, and Rorschach seems quietly relieved that his moment of verbal vulnerability is being allowed to slide unremarked on. Dan doesn't apologize, but Rorschach probably prefers it that way.  
  
"Let's take Archie, tonight," Dan says, reaching up to release the hatch. From behind his back, a grunt of agreement, and then they're off.  
  
*  
  
It's not so much a leap of faith as a leap of logic. Is the Rorschach he knows capable of shaking off a knife wound without comment, taking a blow to the head so sharp that it scrambles his memories without thinking to mention it? Is he prone to sudden bursts of coldness, refusing to call Dan by his name for fear of the closeness it implies? Is sneaking into Dan's house and checking up on him while he sleeps like some kind of obsessed stalker consistent with his past behavior?  
  
Is he capable of unexpected turns of vulnerability and honesty, after a frustrating patrol and when the morning sun hits him just right, catches him off guard?  
  
Yes, yes, yes, regrettably yes, and a conclusive, definitive  _maybe_.  
  
But more than that, the pragmatist in Dan knows—if Rorschach is dead, then the impostor will inevitably slip up when he runs up against a need for information he no longer has a source for, and Dan will know, and Nite Owl will exact all the vengeance the world has room for. If Rorschach is alive but has been hidden away somewhere for the last two weeks, then he is being kept alive, and Dan will have time to find him.  
  
And if Rorschach is the man next to him, returned out of loyalty after a night of mindgames and borderline emotional abuse, then he does not deserve Dan's suspicion.  
  
So an hour ago, in the kitchen, Dan had steeled himself to go downstairs, made ready for the strangeness and the distance and the terror. He would turn his back, to test for the knife. He would open his hand, to test for the bite.   
  
He would set that hand on a shoulder two inches too high.  
  
Dan had picked up the empty cough syrup bottle, still sitting out on the counter like a totem, and regarded it in silence for a very long time.  
  
Then it'd been time to go change, put on Nite Owl's skin and in doing so own his decisions—the light getting soft and violet through the window, clouds like a string of bruises hanging on the horizon.   
  
*  
  
It isn't easy, but he manages it, calls Rorschach  _buddy_  and claps him on the shoulder and puts as much warmth into the space between them as he can. This isn't an act, can't be an act; he has to believe it. He certainly wants to.  
  
He wants to find a way for things to be all right again, for there to be no horror and dread lurking at the edges of his mind, springing out when he least expects them. He wants to have a context that he can consider these questions within, a framework to ask himself  _What if this really is him?_  and  _What if he really wants..._  and  _Do you?_  
  
For all of this, Rorschach is a little skittish, shying away from contact like every moment spent without a buffer of space between them will lead them closer to all the unnameable things that Dan is just now finding names for. The awareness of it is new, but the behavior is not; Rorschach's been acting like this for a while, well before any of the other oddities cropped up. Maybe it's something to do with them and maybe it isn't, but Dan's done with tests and games. He just lets the observation settle, files it away.  
  
Nights pass in a blur. There are plenty of opportunities for the same sort of observation, but Dan doesn't engineer any of them, and now that he isn't trying, more and more things seem obvious. The hitch in Rorschach's voice when he says 'Nite Owl' like he wants to say something else, is forcing himself not to through force of will. The way he jolts when he catches himself standing too close to Dan, recoiling like he's been struck, and steps back to gather himself back to himself. He's fighting with something, but Dan's starting to realize that maybe it isn't what he thought it was.  
  
*  
  
Street vendor food at a touch before midnight, a ritual to keep their strength up that they haven't indulged in in weeks. The streets are still teeming with activity, crime restricted to the back alleys and warehouses and shadows between patches of shuddery light. It's Dan's turn to pick tonight, and he doesn't choose the Thai cart for any reason other than that he's in the mood for it. He only remembers Rorschach's habitual reaction to chemical heat when he sees the reluctant way he takes the bowl from the counter, the stiff set to his jaw under the mask.  
  
Then the mask shifts up just a fraction, and it's too dim for Dan to be sure whether he recognizes the stubbled chin or not but he's sure he knows that tight grimace, the sharp exhale of breath around the first bite, the almost-whimper of almost-pain that of course isn't either of those.  
  
"Sorry, man," he says, and he really is. "I forgot you couldn't— here, let's go find something else, okay?"  
  
Rorschach shakes his head, fedora shifting slightly, still fighting that first forkful. "No need, Nite Owl," he says, "Can manage," and that's just like Rorschach, too.  
  
Dan shouldn't grin—he's been punched for less—but he does anyway.  
  
*  
  
Three muggers near Penn Station, just down an alley between the deli and the bar next door, fifteen year old kid they'd jumped calmed down and sent on his way—and Rorschach's grumbling about only having one pair of cuffs on him.   
  
Rorschach's always preferred rope to cuffs, especially when there are multiple captives, and when they are not dangerous enough to worry that they'll break free. He likes pulling the cord tight, he's said, one last parting gift in the form of rugburned wrists.   
  
Frustrated, he grouses and stews, then finally accepts the cut rope from Nite Owl's offered hand and lashes the miscreants to each other, to the ladder of a fire escape. Good enough.  
  
*  
  
They stop to leave a note on the door of a family whose daughter they'd seen carted off in an ambulance a half an hour earlier, roughed up but all in one piece, terrified and begging them to please, please tell her parents she's okay. And they usually leave that up to the authorities, but Dan had felt his own weeks-old fear-weakened resolve waver and then break, and a promise is a promise.  
  
Rorschach pulls a stub of a pencil from his pocket, a scrap of paper, and scrawls  _Daughter is safe. Lenox Hill Hosp._  on it, just barely legible. Pins it to the door, and the pencil is in his left hand.  
  
*  
  
"Nite Owl," Rorschach says, sounding a little anguished. His hand is on the sugar canister; Dan looks up from where he's fixing coffee, cowl still up but goggles around his neck. He raises one eyebrow, questioning.  
  
Rorschach shifts his hand to the side of the canister, as if to pick it up. "Do you... nnk. Do you mind if I..."  
  
Dan frowns, flat. Rorschach never  _asks_  for sugar cubes; he just takes them, and if it's never been by spoken agreement, Dan's total unwillingness to ever stop him should have served as permanent enough permission.  
  
The mask cants to one side, uncertainty in Rorschach's posture.  
  
"Of course," Dan says, nodding toward the cannister. "Help yourself."  
  
Rorschach does.  
  
*  
  
One week it took Dan to notice, and another week hiding and researching and playing games, and now a third week has passed. Dan isn't any surer of what to believe than he'd been before, evidence stacking up for both cases, and he has to keep coming back to  _is it possible_ —if the answer's yes or even maybe, that has to be good enough.  
  
He has to  _make it_  good enough.  
  
The cap of the syrup bottle's in his belt pouch now, and he touches it like a worry stone, amazed in his more lucid moments at how much power the symbolic has over the human psyche. It would almost be laughable, but nothing about any of this is laughable, and whether it was a leap of faith or logic or into the abyss, it's still a  _leap_. They all go the same way: the flight, and then the suspension, and then the inevitable fall, the shock of impact rubbery and sharp in the heels and ankles and knees even if he manages to land on his feet.  
  
It's a Friday night, and there's an energy on the streets, all the good citizens uncaged and let loose, morals made slippery with alcohol and the promise of a weekend that always ends too soon. The police are on edge, as always. The criminals are on edge, as always.   
  
Dan can feel the moment of impact coming for an hour beforehand.  
  
It's nothing that should normally be a problem, a scuffle that neither expects to spiral out their ability to handle it. Three Knot-tops, a dog chained to a chainlink alley-ender, two kids from some new gang out by the river. Some drugs, some fighting words, a narrow band of territory in dispute. They drop in from above, Rorschach's plan, and it's over almost before it starts, everyone down except the dog where it's huddled, cowering in the refuse.  
  
"Some guard dog," Dan says, grinning as he lashes one of the thugs, hands behind his back. But he shouldn't discount the creature, because it gives a high, warning whine just as Dan sees motion out of the corner of his eye, turns, cape whipping out—  
  
Rorschach is bent, tying another of the gang kids, hasn't seen the one that wasn't knocked quite cold pulling a knife from his boot and swinging out with it—  
  
The shining blade ripping through the air and then coat fabric, flesh, blood outlining its arc and then Rorschach's fist in the boy's face, dropping him to the pavement in an instant—  
  
Fist, curling in against his side, balling into the wound and it's already bleeding too much, Dan can see from here, and like everything in their lives it's happened so  _fast_.  
  
"...Daniel," the rough voice says, quiet, and all Dan can see is the reality of all his gruesome imaginings; all he can think is,  _this is what you get_.  
  
Then Rorschach is struggling to his feet, is saying, "Could use some assistance," and Dan is there, arm around Rorschach's back, taking his weight. In Dan's night vision, the glove balled to Rorschach's side looks brilliantly red and wet, and he feels the ground approaching faster than he thought possible.  
  
Archie is a block away. They can do this, they have to do this. They have to land on their feet.  
  
"Come on," he says, taking the first shuffling step, pavement heavy under his boots. "It isn't far. You'll be fine."  
  
*


	7. Midair Maps

*  
  
Rorschach's never stripped his entire shirt off for a patch-job—Dan's had to try to see the whole picture by looking at one puzzle piece at a time, a flash of pale skin here and there where the shoulder of a sleeve is shrugged down or the tails of coat and shirt are both lifted just a tiny bit. This is an awkward spot, though, and serious enough that when Rorschach lets him take the jacket and starts unbuttoning the dress shirt on his own, it doesn't even occur to Dan to question it. This isn't Amateur Detective Hour anymore; his head's squarely in the situation.  
  
The dress shirt drops to the workbench, careless. There's still a thin undershirt clinging to him, rapidly going red on one side, and he makes an aborted motion against its shoulders; gives a faint grunt, and then glances over his shoulder at Dan. The angle of his face is low, like he doesn't know whether to ask or not, is ashamed to admit he needs the help.  
  
Dan meets the gaze, takes a breath.   
  
"Here," he says, setting the suture packs back on the bench. His gauntlets are gone; his fingertips tingle in the still, still air. "Let me help with that, you're only going to tear something..."  
  
So much skin, taut with lean muscle, cool with system shock and blood loss, skimming under his fingers as he insinuates them between flesh and fabric. He peels the undershirt up and away, and.  
  
And this is not something he ever knew he wanted to touch so badly. God.  
  
"...squirming around, trying to get out of it," he trails off, slipping it off over the clean white dome of Rorschach's skull, then leaving him to work his arms out himself. "You've already done enough damage to yourself tonight."  
  
Rorschach just grunts, a thin shiver passing through him that could be the cold or the pain, could be anything.  
  
The back laid bare in front of him is narrow and angular, well-defined at the shoulders but there's old malnourishment chewing a path up the knobby spine. The shoulders are hunched, down and in, shielding. Dan realizes, distantly, that his hand is still on one of them, has been for maybe too long.  
  
"Okay," he says, "okay," because there are a million details he could choose between here but the only one demanding his undivided attention is the bloody gash, torn-rough edges, too low to have glanced off the ribs, bleeding too well even now to be ignored. "Looks like that knife was pretty dull."  
  
"Probably rusty, too," Rorschach mutters, "knowing my luck."  
  
Dan picks up a washcloth, bends to wash the blood away so that he can see what he's doing, sets in with the needle and thread as soon as he can tell which end is which. "Drop into a clinic tomorrow," he says, quiet, working the first stitch. "They'll give you a tetanus shot if you're worried about it."  
  
A sharp harumph, definitely not in pain. "Yes, and also receive yearly dose of lead, fluoride, and latest experimental behavior-altering pharmaceuticals. Sounds like an excellent idea, Nite Owl."  
  
"Oh, come on." Second stitch, third. It's deep but it's all just skin, he can handle this. "They give those to  _kids_ , do you really think—"  
  
Rorschach just turns to look at him through the mask, and Dan breathes out through his nose, gets back to his work. "Right, of course you do."  
  
"Explains delinquency of current generation of...agh—"  
  
Dan looks up again; now Rorschach is hunched even further between his shoulders, and his hand hovers in front of where his mouth should be, like it wants to stifle the sound.   
  
"Sorry," he says, too little too late and he knows it. "But it's pretty deep, it's going to—"  
  
Rorschach balls the hand into a fist. "Finish it," he growls into his knuckles, mouthing them like he wants to bite down, and buried in the words:  _Stop being so soft_.  
  
So Dan puts aside all thoughts of coddling, like he usually eventually does, and just works the needle in and out, as mechanical as he would sew the leather of his boots or something else dead and unfeeling. He ignores the increasingly harsh sound of Rorschach's breath, ignores the jump in his skin, and when Dan ties off the last stitch the wound is nothing more than a scar-in-progress, one more to join the map of—  
  
The scars. Dan's breath catches; it's so obvious, and he's been so  _stupid_.   
  
There, on the shoulder: last year's fight on the docks, the first one he'd needed stitched. Low across the small of his back, a serpentine and irregular line where he'd been caught by the very end of a chain he'd been a millimeter too close to. Up along the curve of his shoulderblade, and that one's messy because he'd refused to bare enough skin to let Dan suture it but he remembers the knife sinking into Rorschach's coat, going in and in, and how jackrabbit-terrified he'd been in that moment. A map of their shared career, tiny details that roll into the freckles and the knobs of his spine and the way his hips jut above the line of his slacks and the way his shoulders hitch, just like endless bits of sand, every one a little different, rolling up into rocks and bounders and eventually into a mountain.   
  
His inimitable, irreplaceable,  _stubborn as hell_  mountain of a partner.  
  
Dan rests his bare forehead between Rorschach's shoulderblades. He's not sure if he's laughing or crying or  _exploding_ ; all he knows is that the pressure release is too much and it needs  _out_.  
  
"...Nite Owl," Rorschach says, cautiously. "I'm... nggh. The one who is supposed to be in shock. If I understand it correctly."  
  
The laughter trails off into something not entirely distinguishable from a sobbing. "Stop calling me... you know my  _name_ , damn it."  
  
The thought surfaces through the hysteria: He did, in the alley. He did.  
  
"Daniel," and Rorschach sounds more forceful now, straightening up against the way Dan's hands have started to drift down his sides. "Why are you—what's wrong?"  
  
"Nothing," Dan laughs, tries really hard to make it sound like a laugh. "Nothing. I'm just so glad it's really you."  
  
No reply, just the sob-laughter and Rorschach still working to get his breathing under control.  
  
"So happy, god, I can't even—"  
  
"Expecting someone else?"  
  
Dan lifts his face; over Rorschach's shoulder, the mask is turned toward him, and it's hitched up over his nose now in all the bright light and all he can think is,  _I know that chin_ , and that is somehow paralyzingly hilarious. The laughter redoubles, his thoughts shatter, and he is lost.  
  
*


	8. Uncovering Mountains

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yeah, this is the explicit bit. Have fun! :D

*

It's probably only five or ten minutes before he's calmed down enough to just be breathing against Rorschach's scarred, beautiful back, cheek against his spine. Feels like longer, spent laughing all the doubt and suspicion and terror out, all the grief and rage. Feels like hours, like _years_.

"I thought you were dead," he says, feeling a little stupid as he says it but not giving a good goddamn. "Working theory was... that someone had killed you, taken your costume to try to imitate you."

Under the side of his face, the spine uncurls, straightens up as the body it belongs to pulls taut. Dan ignores it, continues on because if he doesn't get this out now, he won't ever: "So I was trying to find ways to know if it was... that was the secret you said I was keeping, god I was such an ass that night, I'm so sorry..."

More stiffening, and Dan's sure he's about to be chewed out but instead Rorschach just asks, quietly, carefully, "Thought you were working with an impostor, a murderer?"

A nod against the bare skin, fingers curling a grip in Rorschach's side. Clinging.

"For three weeks." Another nod. "And you stayed in that that trap, for _that long_ , putting yourself at risk?"

"I had to know. If I was right, then... I'd have to do something about it." A long, precarious swallow against a mouth gone totally dry. "Avenge you, you know?"

Seconds stretch, then, into minutes. At first, Rorschach is just shaking; then he's shaking his head, violently—Dan can feel the muscle play against his face—and lifting his arms and ducking his head. "Irresponsible of me," he says, working at something with his hands. "Could have been exposed, exploited, killed."

"I knew that going in."

"Still an unacceptable risk for you to have to take," he says, and his voice is wavering and strange with something dark and then he's pulling away, turning on the bench to face Dan.

The mask is held in his hands like an offering.

Dan stares, suddenly doubting his own ability to discern reality.

"So you have an easy way to check," Rorschach says, "If it happens again," but they both know nothing this ludicrous will happen again and Rorschach is shaking from more than shock and his voice sounds run through and _wrecked_.

When Dan cups his hands around that face—familiar, unfamiliar, ugly and flawed and perfect, the sum of a million tiny details he'd spent a year counting and adding up through the ink—and pulls Rorschach in toward himself, there is no resistance.

*

Another leap, another sharp, sudden descent. Dan can't see the bottom from where he is, but he doesn't care, just pressing his forehead against his partner's, lacing his fingers to cup the back of his skull, pull him in. The eyes watching him are sharp and intent, unforgiving.

He can't rush forward, under that gaze—just angles his face in to catch Rorschach's lips glancingly, like it's an accident that they both know it isn't, and Rorschach doesn't know how to do this at _all_ but at least he's _trying_ and god, Dan doesn't even feel the fall.

"Shh," Dan soothes, because Rorschach's heart is racing, shocky and bright, when Dan slides his hands around the front of his throat, spreads his fingers to take in the exact curve and muscle tone and the way it all jumps when Rorschach swallows. He feels like he's been struck blind, the way he feels a need to map everything out by touch, sliding his cheek across Rorschach's, nipping at the corner of his jaw, hands spreading over his collarbone and his chest and fanning out over his firm stomach. It's all too hot, too burning and amazing to be real.

He presses his lips to Rorschach's throat, sucks hard, and that's apparently where the line is because Rorschach chokes against it. "Daniel, what... what are you doing?"

"Getting a baseline." He believes it himself, kind of, hands working in methodical arcs over Rorschach's chest now like he's building a topographical map. They only pause for moment when they brush over the hard tiny nipples, giving a quick circle to gauge his response—Rorschach buckles over on himself, and if he's this sensitive then all the layers make sense—then he does it again, just because he wants to. 

"It's horrible how little I know about you," he murmurs into Rorschach's mouth, trying to bolster up the lie.

"Very... intimate baseline." _Bullshit_ , his tone says, but he'd never be that vulgar aloud. "That you're aiming for."

Dan waves one hand, dismissive. "Hardest to imitate. Anyway, I don't see you pushing me off?"

"Did... keep your secrets well," Rorschach says, like that explains it, makes his acquiescence make sense. Maybe this is a reward, _here, have a gold star_. "Better than I would have expected."

"I had to."

"Even this one," he says, and there's no audible question mark but it's still a question.

A pause, drawing itself out to a fine point. "I.... actually, I didn't know this one myself." Dan laughs, a little light-headed. Presses his face back into Rorschach's throat, stifling it there, and he still feels a little hysterical. "Until now. I guess I'm just that good at keeping secrets."

"Ridiculous," the word buzzes under his lips, and god, the things Rorschach's voice are doing to him right now... if he has to _feel_ it too, he's going to do something stupid. Stupider.

So Dan ducks his head, follows his hands with his mouth, lips that he keeps having to re-moisten and tongue that wants to dip in and out of other secrets, follow every line and curve. "Yeah, buddy, I know. Trust me, I know."

The angle's awkward, their height difference more obvious now that Rorschach's off his feet, and Dan finally just sinks to his knees between Rorschach's thighs. His hands skate down Rorschach's sides, touching and not-touching, avoiding his injury but measuring finger-lengths between scars and freckles and thick knots of muscle, bone. 

There's a hard, full-body shudder when they come to rest on his hips, waistband of his slacks pulling low. Shaking hands settle on his cheeks, and Dan lets them lift his gaze, watches expressions shift across the unfamiliar face. They finally settle into something open-mouthed and slack, flush rising along the lines of Rorschach's cheekbones. 

"Would have avenged me," he says, voice full of awe.

Dan closes his eyes, opens them again, thumbs circling the closure of Rorschach's slacks. "Of course."

"What would you have done to them?"

He's just gotten the button undone and the zipper worked far enough to bare an edge of curls, rust-colored and brambly, and is leaning forward to nose into them when Rorschach's question stops him cold. 

He's looking for something specific, here. Some turn of violence or dedication, the loyalty of blood spilt in kind, the smell of it thick and heavy in the city's closeness—layered in the air with adrenaline and sex, indelible. Dan searches for an appropriately ghastly image, for the hanging end of his own sentence, _if you've killed him..._

There's nothing there. And he can't bring himself to lie right now, to make something up; there have been too many lies already. 

"I... I don't really know," he says, voice quiet, breathing in the hot mustiness here as he runs one cheek along the straining line of Rorschach's zipper. There's a disappointed noise at his words, but it shifts halfway along into something wanting. _Do that again_ , it says, and Dan does, opening his lips over the taut fabric, mouthing him through it. Rorschach sucks a breath through his teeth, fists tightening on the edge of the workbench.

"I didn't think that far," Dan says, pulling away for a moment, just breathing over the damp fabric. "I think if I was planning for that..."

"Would make it true?"

Dan bites his lip; works the zipper farther, eyes down and burning a little damp and he's never been so glad that he knows exactly how long scars take to heal, or he'd still be wondering, god. 

"Maybe, yeah," he says, slipping the band of the underwear down before either of them can think better of it, watching Rorschach's knuckles go white from the corner of his eye. "Superstitious, I know."

Rorschach opens his mouth to comment, probably a backhanded insult. Dan cuts him off before he can, swallowing the head of his cock, and it pulls a noise from Rorschach that is completely unmistakable. Agony threaded through with the fear of obliteration, it's the same noise he's made whenever a blade has struck either of them too close to bone, dropping him roughly to his knees, cradled in the arms of a bleeding city.

Then Dan pulls back, letting his lips slip off over the flared edge; gives the slit a hard suck, and what the noise changes into is new, has no point of comparison. Dan will never be able to mistake it for anything else.

"Tell me if you need me to stop," he finally thinks to say, voice stuttery and maybe just as afraid as Rorschach feels, body trembling under his hands and mouth. His lips form the words against the hard curve of Rorschach's erection, and he mouths there when they're gone, drags his tongue over the length like he's mapping it, aimless and exploratory. And he really doesn't know what he's doing, here, has never done this before—though he's always kind of wanted to try, in a weird way—and is just going off of what he's liked himself in the past. Foreskin is a fucking mystery in that respect, and he slips his tongue under it, testing.

The response is immediate and explosive; Rorschach's hands on his shoulders, pushing him back and off of him so hard and so fast that Dan's a little afraid he might have taken some of the skin with him, teeth unshielded.

Just breath between them, for a long moment, labored and damp.

And shit, he must have gone too far somehow, and Dan's about to stammer out an apology that he barely means because of course he didn't mean to upset him but yeah, he really had meant to stick his tongue there, had really wanted to, had loved how hot and musky it'd been in the second before he'd been pushed away...

"Don't—" Rorschach says first, words coming out all jagged and wrong. "Shouldn't. Need you up— want you. Up here."

The hands are under his arms now, trying to haul him back up to his feet. Leverage isn't in his favor.

"Shouldn't be on your knees," he says as Dan finally obliges, one hand heavy on the bench for balance, pressed up against the inside of Rorschach's thigh. "Don't deserve that, after— too good. For that."

"I don't—"

"Too good for any of this," he mumbles, as Dan leans in against him, fingers coming up to stroke jutting cheekbones. "Debasing yourself, for me. Don't know why."

"For you?" Dan laughs again, but it's more even now. "Here I was, disbelieving my luck because you hadn't knocked all my teeth out yet."

"Have been distant," Rorschach says, the meander of explanation in it, then gasps as Dan's hand closes around him. Dan's hard as hell himself, has been for a while and it's getting uncomfortable; he grinds himself against the side of the bench, trying to take the edge off. "Because I... _oh_."

"Oh?"

"Oh," Rorschach repeats, with a growl of sarcasm. "Need the word defined?"

"No, I think I got it—" and then it's Dan's turn to cut himself off, moaning brokenly, because Rorschach's suddenly tugging his shirt out of the belt and running his own hands up under the spandex. Shaky, but undeterred.

"If you can do reconnaissance," he says, ducking his head to the side in embarrassment at what he's saying, "I can too."

Dan's costume doesn't leave much to the imagination; there's nothing Rorschach can learn this way that his eyes hadn't already told him. He smiles, almost says so, but then Rorschach's working at his belt and any inclination to pedantry evaporates. 

"Of course you can," he says, dragging the heel of his hand over Rorschach, smearing the beading dampness down along his length. Rorschach bucks, almost off the bench, and Dan has to steady him with one hand to his hip; then Rorschach has his belt off and his costume bottom pushed down, an inexplicable time lapse, and has him in hand. 

His grip is unsure, unpracticed, like he's never even touched _himself_. He seems to just do whatever feels right, pumping steadily up and down, and for all the lack of finesse Dan still feels his knees go to water.

"God," he says; Rorschach grunts at the blasphemy. "That's..."

"Could happen to you, after all," Rorschach says, trying to keep his voice at a rational, even keel. It's mostly not working, and he's falling further into Dan's grip every time Dan runs his hand up and down, coaxing. "Need to know what you really... that you're really..."

"It's okay," Dan says, circling his thumb hard around the head; he can feel how swollen it is now, feel how close his partner is, hear it in his voice. He loops his free arm around Rorschach's shoulders, steadies him flush against himself, nearly off the bench. "You can let it go now."  
A sharp jerk into his hand; a tightening in the grip around him; a sharp, mournful noise.

"We both can," Dan says, and then there's a hot stickiness and all of Rorschach's weight is against him, and it's all he can do to brace him against the bench with both arms and rut into the relaxing grip until it's enough for him to let go, too.

*

At first, Rorschach seems content to just lie back on the bench where he's collapsed, among all the cut thread ends and bloody washcloths, severe eyes pressed closed. Dan sits on the edge next to him, slumped, one hand tracing idly over the flat of his stomach. As afterglow goes, it's better than he expected.

Then Rorschach seems to hit some internal limit or timer, and he tries to sit up abruptly; gasps when the motion pulls on his stitches, and would fall back to the bench if Dan weren't so quick to get an arm under him, catch him up.

"You rip those out," he says, easing Rorschach's unsteady frame up to sit, "and you'll just have to spend longer with your shirt off, while I put them back in."

"Hehn."

"Wouldn't want that, would you." Dan's hand smoothes from the base of his skull to just between his shoulderblades and back again, making it clear that he, at least, wouldn't mind it. 

Rorschach just ducks his head, like he's trying to hide his face. Dan thinks he knows why, isn't blind—just a little terrifyingly in love, and that brings its own myopia—and he could say _Hey, it's okay_ , or _I don't care what you look like_ , but nothing really sounds right, in his head. So he just reaches for Rorschach's jaw, turns his face back toward himself, holds him there.

The fierce eyes bore into him, challenging.

When enough time has passed that there's no arguing that everything's sunk in, Dan leans in and kisses him again, soft and hungry; feels warm all the way to his toes when Rorschach responds, self-consciousness dropping away. It ends quietly on its own, and they drift a bit, propping each other up where their foreheads meet.

"Okay?" Dan asks, after a moment passes.

Another stretch; then a nod against him, and Rorschach is leaning away, sliding to the edge of the bench, hands already working to hide himself away, put himself to rights. 

Dan watches. Rorschach doesn't seem to mind.

Somewhere between the run of the zipper and the tugging slide of the undershirt going back on, it occurs to Dan just how young Rorschach is, teetering somewhere between twenty and thirty, but he supposes he's just as young and why he expected his partner to be so much older, he isn't sure. 

He wonders, given the nature of this thing they do, if they will ever actually be old.

"Hey," Dan says, reaching out to snag Rorschach by the wrist, before he can shoulder the dress shirt on. The whole arm stiffens, then the rest of him, and Dan quells the instinctual alarm, forces himself to hold on until it relaxes again.

When it does, he turns Rorschach's hand palm up, thumbs at the knobby bones of his wrist. "Come upstairs with me," he says, "We both need the rest."

Rorschach just stares at him, unreadable; pulls on his hand, and Dan lets it slip out of his grip. Watches him shrug the shirt on, the suspenders, and reach for his jacket.

"I need—" Rorschach starts to say, then cuts off, picking up the mask. There's got to be something soothing, Dan thinks, in the way it drifts to life in the warmth of his hands.

Then it's pulled on, low over the bridge of his nose, and the hat drops into place and all of a sudden all Dan can see is the outline, the sharp silhouette cut against dawn light, lingering in alleys and in his bedroom doorway. Rorschach reaches out with a still-bare hand, touches Dan's mouth just there, where the lip was split in a fight last spring, where the scar still lingers.

"Time," he finally says. "Need to..."

Dan nods, saving him from having to struggle for words—because it's okay, he understands.

*


	9. Quiet Hours

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wow, so. somehow I forgot to post the last chapter. Sorry about that, guys.

*

Dan cleans up the mess by himself, scoops the detritus into a biowaste bin and collects the pieces of his costume that he'd thrown aside in the haste of Emergency. He really had hoped he wouldn't end the morning watching the back of a trenchcoat disappear down the tunnel, but you don't always get what you want.

Anyway, all he'd said was _time_ , and what does that even mean? Days, weeks? After tonight, the thought of Rorschach working alone for any length of time bothers him.

In the kitchen, he goes through the drawers, finds the bundle of unsolved cases Hollis had left with him, and drops them into the trash can. Not satisfied, he pulls the entire bag, only half-full. Outside the air is cold, that biting October chill, and the bag swings against his calf all the way to the street.

The sky is hours from lightening; the night had ended so early for them. But the moon's still out, low and heavy, and the skyline is sharp, jagged teeth against the sky. 

He leaves the bag by the curb, contents exorcised from his home and his life.

Upstairs, the bed is warm and welcoming, and maybe a little too empty but he is still asleep in minutes.

*

He's not sure exactly what time it is when he's awoken by a shuffling noise nearby—even the bedside clock is beyond him without his glasses—but it's after dawn, because his room has that diffuse glow of being on the edge of a dream.

The mattress sinks, next to him, and the blanket pulls across his chest. The body curling up against him feels bulky, and the sound of fabric over fabric fills his half-asleep mind with the image of a thin man in thick layers, bundled away in them for safekeeping. He can feel something plasticky, against his shoulder.

The plastic something moves, stretches over a mouth opening and closing in too many false starts. Dan drifts back toward sleep.

"I've been distant," a voice finally says, rough and low, cutting through the quiet. The words sound familiar; Dan thinks he's heard them before, though he doesn't know what comes next. "Because I've been feeling like. Like this. About you. If you could just be the mask, then there wouldn't be anyone to want—this. From."

_Nite Owl_ , Dan hears in his head, but now he hears the nuance, the tightness in his partner's throat. 

"Knew it was bound to happen eventually," Rorschach continues, and the canvas of his coat is rough where Dan can feel it against his skin. "Wouldn't be strong enough forever, but if I could just delay it..."

"Hours," Dan mumbles. Time is apparently measured in hours. He grins, rolls over toward the intruder in his bed, slings one arm around the narrow waist.

Rorschach makes a confused noise, and Dan isn't sure he's said anything aloud, but he shakes his head anyway. "Nothing," he slurs. "Why didn't you just... ask me?"

A long silence then, and it could be a few minutes later or an hour, he could have slept between. He isn't sure. 

"Certain of rejection," Rorschach says, pure practicality. "Knew you were a good man, above this sort of... casual dalliance."

Dan makes some kind of noise in the negative, nuzzles up under Rorschach's chin. He's not sure what he's saying no to, his being a good man or this being casual; he's not awake enough for this, and damn him but Rorschach must know that. He takes a hard breath in defiance, bites his lip until the pain gets some adrenaline going, forces his eyes open.

In front of them, nothing but the mystery of shifting ink. Which reminds him...

"So, explain this to me," he says, carefully picking through the words, forcing out the slur. "What's been going on, the last few weeks?"

The ink fans out. Rorschach is holding himself awkwardly, like he doesn't really know how to lie in a bed. "I just told you, don't need to—"

"No, I mean," and Dan leans in again, grazing the latex with his cheek. "I get all of that. But what about your coat, it looks like you got stabbed."

"Did," he says simply, half into the pillow. 

"And you tried to hide it from me."

"Knew you'd worry, fuss over it. Like—"

Like tonight. Like he did tonight, and look what terrifying new territory that has landed them in. 

Rorschach makes a throaty noise, almost like laughter. "Old laundromat threw me off the premises when I walked in with a bloody coat. Said she didn't want to be involved in it. Had to find a new one. Don't like them, believe they specialize in that kind of work, too many convenient chemicals on hand." The smell, of _course._ "Possible underworld connections, we should look into it."

And Dan does laugh, because it is something he knows how to do. "Of course we should. Might give us a lead on the Underboss."

A quiet grunt in agreement, and nothing more.

"Okay, so," Dan finally says, "What about you not remembering the monkeys, come _on_."

A memory-pulling pause. "I remember them now. Not sure about the other night. Might have sustained a head injury, it's not uncommon."

"That you also didn't think to mention. For the same reason?"

"...yes."

Dan sighs, pulls his arm tighter around Rorschach's back. Runs through the list in his head: Rorschach coming onto him out on the street makes some sense now, whether it was intentional or not, but... "The stuff with the cats? I've never seen you act like that before."

Silence, tightening into something uncomfortable.

"Haven't ever encountered... nng. Have my reasons, don't really want to—"

"Okay, okay," Dan says, and he's just realizing what an interrogation this is turning into. He has been a terrible friend, lately, and now he's being a terrible... whatever it is that they are, now, and he isn't even sure. "I get it, my imagination running away with me. That's probably what most of it was."

Another careful stretch, Rorschach shifting against him, uncomfortable. 

"Not... not just your imagination," his partner finally says, and the breath of it comes lower, tucked up under Dan's chin. "Very astute observations. Had no idea you'd collected so much evidence."

"Mmm," Dan says, letting his eyes slip closed again.

"Impressive." Rorschach finally touches him under the blanket, gloved hand coming to a tentative rest on his shoulder. "Understandable that you'd want answers."

Dan smiles, sleepiness drifting back in. There's other things but he understands, now, can see how he'd let it all snowball, how his own cagey behavior had been feeding the cycle.

"This isn't casual," he says, remembering. "At least, not to me."

Rorschach just hrms against his throat, lets it go.

It's quiet, and everything seems pretty much how it should, and the bed is warmer now, less empty. Somewhere out in the street, he can hear the slinging metal noise of trashmen out, collecting. Everything is mundane and wonderful.

Except.

"Wait a minute," Dan says, eyes snapping open; next to him, Rorschach makes a disappointed noise. He'd obviously hoped this was over. "Wait, I have to ask one more thing."

"Impressive _and _insufferable."__

__"Yeah, yeah, but look," and Dan shifts back, looking Rorschach straight in the blots. The mask's gotten pulled up to his nose somehow; Dan has a vague, shifting memory of lips on his throat, mixed in with all the warm dawn normalcy and street noise. "How the hell did you change your _height_?"_ _

__A long, long-suffering sigh. Rorschach doesn't answer, but he shifts under the blanket, working something with his feet, and Dan hears one hard clunk of something hitting the floor, then another. Sounds like..._ _

__"You were wearing your boots in my _bed?_ " Dan laughs, pushing himself up to a sitting position, then flops face first in the other direction, runs one arm off the foot of the bed to snag at the offending shoes. He'd been naked under the sheets, and from the choked sound it seems like this is the first time Rorschach's realized that. Dan ignores it, grabs up a boot by its heel, turns it upside down. "You probably got mud all over—"_ _

__Wait. Dan feels around inside again, wanting to be sure he's right; the lift comes away in his hand, fished out of the shoe like it's some bizarre treasure._ _

__"Seriously?" Dan asks, grin splitting his face. "Elevator shoes?"_ _

__Rorschach's pushed himself up, is as beet red as he's ever been, just under the line of the mask. He sputters for a moment, then hangs his head. "Thought it would make me more..."_ _

__"Intimidating?"_ _

__A grumbled, mumbled string of _very_ sharp invectives, then: "...yes."_ _

__God, that's... that's hilarious, but Dan does his best not to laugh. He drops the shoe back to the carpet, crawls over to straddle Rorschach through the blanket, peels the mask away and hangs it carefully on the bedpost._ _

__Through the blush, Rorschach glowers up at him, menacing. Dan shivers all over, from more than just the morning air on bare skin._ _

__"Trust me," he says, leaning in meet that menace, take it and hold it close and own it, tucked in under his ribs. "You're intimidating enough just as you are."_ _

__*_ _


End file.
